The Trouble With Tracing Fruits and Veggies

Before fruits and vegetables end up in your refrigerator, they take a long and winding road from the farm to the store. But when problems arise in that complex supply chain, it's exceedingly difficult to trace what happened.

Today, it has been nearly two weeks since the Food and Drug Administration linked a salmonella outbreak to contaminated tomatoes, and still the agency has not been able to conclusively determine where the tomatoes came from or what caused them to go bad.

The FDA said today that 228 people in 23 states have been sickened from tainted tomatoes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many experts and legislators charged today that the reason is because the United States does not have a system in place to effectively and consistently track the movements of the nation's fruits and vegetables.

"Produce is produced in a very complicated system where you have a lot of movement, a lot of trans-shipment and commingling," said William Hubbard, a former FDA official now in charge of Alliance for a Stronger FDA.

"It makes it very, very difficult to trace a given tomato back to its source," he said.

"If they have a box that's maybe half full of tomatoes, they might add tomatoes from another box that came from a completely different farm, maybe a different state, even a different part of the country," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

What's more, while packaged bags of produce such as lettuce have bar codes on them to help trace their movement, tomatoes and other produce do not have similar tags.

The complexities of ensuring the safety of the food supply are revealed today in a report released this morning by the Government Accountability Office. The report said the FDA's plan to protect the nation's food supply isn't fleshed out enough to work effectively.

"Recent outbreaks such as E. coli from spinach and salmonella from tomatoes have undermined consumer confidence in the safety of the food supply," the report stated.

Today on Capitol Hill, outraged House lawmakers also lambasted the FDA for not ensuring the safety of the food supply. Prior to the hearing, the committee voted to issue subpoenas for nine private food laboratories that failed to comply with the committee's request for documents relating to the testing of food products under import alerts.

"Food and Drug cannot even identify the source of contamination or to know where the tomatoes, which are poisoning Americans, have originated," said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. "These continued outbreaks are unacceptable. To have Food and Drug come up and say they don't know what to do about it, or how much money they need, or what resources they require is a shame and a disgrace."

Criticisms of the FDA date back to 1998 when the investigative arm of Congress first cited agency deficiencies. A decade later, the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations already has held eight hearings on the agency's food safety shortcomings, making today's session just the latest one in a long line.

Committee members called on the agency to require immediate implementation of country-of-origin labeling to better track the nation's food. To help keep produce safe, today's food processors along the supply chain are required to know only who they bought from and sold to. They might not have any knowledge of who is involved further up or down the chain.